Of Train Wrecks and Car Crashes, Part II

 Faith and Haste Are Usually Like Oil and Water

Conversion for the Apostle Paul appears to have been like a fatal car crash.  The old was smashed.  But out of the wreckage, something new, something wonderful was born.  The Scriptures do not give many details, but it seems that some time after Paul's dramatic Damascus road experience, when the shards of his former identity lay scattered on the ground, he retired to obscurity and privacy.  It would appear that he needed time to be reconstructed, rebuilt by the Spirit to equip him for the ministry ahead.

Paul tells us that after his initial conversion, he went away into Arabia (a desolate and relatively uninhabited place); then he returned to Damascus and then after three years he "came out", going up to Jerusalem to visit with the apostles.  Then, subsequently, he went to Syria and Cilicia  (Galatians 1: 11-24)  All up, it appears that there was a period of about fifteen years between his initial conversion and before his public call to the work of apostleship. 

The breaking of an old identity--particularly one very strongly etched and inscribed--takes time.
  In Rosaria Butterfield's confessions or "Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert"  there are many passages detailing doubts, questions, struggles, pain, and suffering as she moved from darkness into the light.  The idea, fable really, of people painlessly and without friction instantly transforming from the old man to the new is never real. 

At one point she describes it this way:

Two incommensurable worldviews clashed together: the reality of my lived experience and the truth of the world of God.  In continental philosophy, we talk about the difference between the true and the real.  Had my life become real, but not true?  The Bible told me to repent, but I didn't feel like repenting.  Do you have to feel like repenting in order to repent?  Was I a sinner, or was I, in my drag queen friend's words, sick? How do you repent for a sin that doesn't feel like a sin?  How could the thing that I had studied and become be sinful?  How could I be tenured in a field that is sin?  How could I and everyone that I knew and loved be in sin?

In this crucible of confusion, I learned something important.  I learned this first rule of repentance: that repentance requires greater intimacy with God than with our sin.  How much greater?  About the size of a mustard seed.  Repentance requires that we draw near to Jesus, no matter what.  And sometimes we all have to crawl there on our hands and knees.  Repentance is an intimate affair.  And for many of us, intimacy with anything is a terrifying prospect.  [Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor's Journey into Christian Faith (Pittsburg: Crown and Covenant Publications, 2012), p.21.]

We fear that in our belief in an instant, gratifying creation we expect that conversion will be a relatively quick and instant affair, like Nescafe.  The conversion of Paul fits into this paradigm.  We see him on the road to Damascus.  We see the great light.  We hear the voice of Christ from heaven.  We observe him rising from his blind bed and going straight to the synagogue to confront the Jewish people with Jesus as the Son of God.  That's the kind of conversion we look for in our Nescafe world.  Right.  Paul is now one of us.  He is arraigned in the ranks.  Let's go after the next convert.

But it took years to prepare Paul thoroughly for what was ahead of Him.  The Lord is never in a hurry.  His work is most often slow and gradual and far too often Christians and churches don't have the patience to work with people slowly and gradually.  We think the real and the divine always produces instant and spectacular change: the more spectacular and the more instant the more evidently divine.  In this we are gravely and sadly mistaken.  It ultimately makes us impatient with God and frustrated with the Church and with fellow Christians. 

There are many reasons we don't have patience, either with God or with man.  One is our own sinful hearts.  Impatience, after all, is a demanding, arrogant attitude towards God and man.  "I want it, and I want it now", and the reason is I am important in my own eyes.

Rosaria Butterfield talks about learning to obey God one step at a time, slowly, gingerly, painfully.  When she first started attending church she felt awkward and uncomfortable--despite the warmth and welcome of the congregation.  In one sermon she heard of Jesus' dictum that if men obey Him they would find out soon enough whether His word was from God (John 7:17).  She learned, as she puts it, that obedience comes before understanding.  Then she says:

I started to obey God in my heart one step at a time.  I broke up with my girlfriend.  My heart really wasn't in the break-up, but I hoped that God would regard my obedience even in its double-mindedness.  I started to go to the [Presbyterian Reformed] church fully, in my heart, for the whole purpose of worshiping God.  I stopped caring if I looked like a freak there.  I started to receive the friendship that the church members offered to me.  I learned that we must obey in faith before we feel better or different.  (Ibid. p.22)

It takes time for the new person to grow out of the fatal car crash of repentance.  And, let us never forget this: in more Christian times, when the truths of the Gospel and the law of God were institutionalised and socialised into the warp and woof of the culture, many folk would become Christians and would end up doing and behaving in their new Christian life as they had been raised.  They, like the Prodigal, would return to the household culture of their youth. This is no longer generally the case.  Sin and its fruits have so perverted the West that the average person is self-identified, socialised and institutionalised  into unbelief and sin.  These generations of unbelief and rebellion has born consistent fruits.  Conversion now requires transformation, not a returning home.  Most people today have never been in the home in the first place.  It is a totally foreign place to them.

Today, as not seen in the generations of our forbears, ministry to the lost and the dying requires much care, much patience, and much faith.  Above all, we must be willing and prepared to work and serve at God's pace, not our own.  One day with Him is as a thousand years.  This means that the little things of daily life are to be counted as vitally significant and important.  He who believes will not be in haste.